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Mild Things

November 23, 2009

I went a few weeks ago to see Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” and kept pretty quiet about it. But it’s still playing in many places here in the city, and 1,010 places nationwide, and before it vanishes altogether, I can’t resist—sparked by a tweet from my friend Kevin Lee at Also Like Life—putting my two cents in. The movie lost me long before Max got to the island of monsters. The real-world home life that he abandons for his fantasies plays like fantasies by the writer-director Spike Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers. The movie starts on a snowy day in a nameless suburb. Max isn’t the most popular boy on the block; he’s lonely, and aggressive, and pesters the big kids across the street who are his big sister’s friends because they won’t pay attention to him and his igloo. In the roughhousing that ensues, Max’s igloo gets destroyed and Max is momentarily buried in snow. He’s frightened, humiliated, and ignored; he takes revenge on his sister (making a mess in her room) and is scolded for it, then can’t bear it when his single mother pays more attention to her date than to him. Big deal. These ostensible traumas, this ostensible pain, is utterly generic, a signifier of the stuff that most smart and sensitive kids deal with daily, and which really isn’t that big a deal. (Jonze and Eggers seem to be playing it up as a way of giving some deeper psychological foundation to the pretty straightforward childlike stubbornness that gives Maurice Sendak’s book its authentic heart.)

But how big a deal it seems to Jonze and Eggers becomes clear when, on the island where he encounters the Wild Things, Max talks of his desire to do away with the “sadness and loneliness”—something that has less to do with their needs and desires than with his own—or, rather, with the screenwriters’ notion that so much of experience can be summed up under those two signifiers, and that there’s some implicit happiness awaiting those who can suppress them. I suppose there are interpreters who would say that Max leaves the island and goes home at the point that he realizes there’s no doing so; I’d say that it’s when he realizes that with “kingship” comes responsibilities for others that he’s not ready to take, and he goes home to the mother who, in the absence of others, is the best choice he’s got. It has nothing to do with Max losing illusions about the notion of a crystalline happiness, devoid of sadness.

I’d argue that there’s no happiness without sadness and loneliness; that life isn’t lived on a single axis; that happiness is a function of a very wide range of experiences, many of which would land on the negative range of one criterion or another; and that the movie purveys an utterly simplistic, sentimental, and banal notion of what would constitute an ideal childhood, or, for that matter, an ideal life. Despite all the psychologizing and agonizing of the monsters, who mirror a version of the sodden adult world as Max sees it, the movie is no hard-nosed view of childhood, or of life; it’s a sentimental creampuff dressed up in a monster suit.